July 27, 2010

My second-to-last physical quick knits club packages (before switching to pdf-only) got mailed out a week ago – it was some hectic times getting this one together, but I am so so happy with how it turned out! The theme was Accessorize, and my aim was for there to be something for everyone…

With the 15 yard mini-skein, the pattern was these Blooming Flowers, in 3 different sizes (barely blooming, blooming, and the cephalopod-esque fully bloomed) – the 15 yards is enough to make 6 or 7 of them!

By threading a pipe cleaner (or 2) through the flowers, and wrapping it around ribbon, the flowers can be turned into a necklace (like above), a headband (like below, or like this), a bracelet, or whatever else the maker can think up!

Another option is to turn 2 (or more!) flowers into a pair of earrings, like these:

Each club package included everything needed to make earrings like those, which means members could also choose to use the parts to try out my 2-bead earrings tutorial (like the ones below), or make any other kinds of earrings with the 2 earwires, 2 headpins, 2 eyepins, and many assorted pairs of beads included in the package!

Or, another option for members is to use all those parts to make a collection of beaded stitch markers! Turning each headpin, eyepin, and earwire into a stitch marker means you get 6 fancy-pants beaded treats for your knitting! Aaaand, the other pattern can provide a place to store them:

To accessorize your keys, bag, or whatever you clip it onto, the Robot Monster Pouch is sized exactly to hold a tic-tac case, which can be repurposed to store stitch markers, or anything else that fits! The case wasn’t included in the package, but the googly eyes were:

Everyone got a bundle of 4 pipe cleaners and a piece of ribbon, and a little (recycled) baggie filled with all those jewelry-making parts, a keyring, a hook, and lots of beads…

Oh yeah and the yarn! Recycled dyed is 56% nylon, 40% angora, 4% lambswool fingering weight – used to be a bright fuschia color, overdyed with blue, purple, and red to make a less bright purple shade. I named it Dedicated Follower of Fashion. The spun yarn, Fashion is Danger, is a lambswool/angora/rayon blend with a shiny silver strand running through, spun and plied with vintage lurex metallic thread and a variegated thread.

And a complete club package:

Don’t forget to sign up for the last club kit (only a few days left till the 1st) – August’s theme is Games and I’m way excited about it!!

March 27, 2010

So all the house-buying stuff has been going super well, and now our moving date is exactly one month from today! That means many things, a major one being that I need to de-stash! I also would like to make an extra bit of moving-expenses money, so I’m kind of combining these needs into a leethal giveaway sale!

I’ve created a giveaway page in the shop (which you can click to from the top of the shop home page, or the photo box on the leethal home page), full of various pieces of recycled sweaters and other fun crafty gifts, and if you place any order from my shop (that totals at least $9) you get to choose one – I pay shipping on the gift, you get some fun materials to craft with!

Want some ideas for how you could use these sweater pieces? Here are some projects/tutorials I’ve made!

Use sweater pieces in bigger recycled sweater projects, as buttonbands and/or pockets, like the ones in my cardigan or vest.

No tutorial for these, but coffee cup sleeves are easy to make, functional, and have tons of room for creative embellishments!

I’ve made tons of hats with felted and un-felted sweaters – this hat tutorial for the one above shows how to make a kitty hat with a sweater that doesn’t felt (only difference between a felted sweater is that there can’t be raw edges that will unravel). I did a post on craftster many years ago (pre-blog) with a bunch of recycled material hats… Here are a few more examples below – the triangle top fabric on the left is one of the giveaway options:

And one last how-to by me – also a looong time ago on craftster, I did a silly little tutorial for these felt boots:

You can find more recycled sweater projects in a Threadbanger roundup I did awhile back… I know I once saw a how-to for making a purse with a sweater yoke (which would be perfect for light pink piece three down on the right) but I can’t find it – if anyone knows what I’m talking about, you could post a link in the comments…

And then my other crafty giveaway option is a baggie of beads, which came from Knittn’ Kitten! I have an alternate motive with this option of sharing a piece of my most favorite craft store with a few of you far away from Portland who aren’t lucky enough to be able to shop there. Each baggie has a bunch of beads, mostly glass, all in pairs, so they’re great for earrings. The reason I’m de-stashing so many of these beautiful beads is that I keep buying bags of them, use 2 for a pair of earrings for myself, and the rest of the bag sits there since I don’t really do any other bead projects, so now I get to spread the bead goodness!

I did a tutorial for these simple 2-bead earrings, a good beginner project… Each giveaway baggie also includes some cheap earwires to play around with (the same kind I used in this pair and these) and a few eyepins.

If you were being observant at the top of this post, you may have noticed some books in the back of that giveaways photo – that’s because leethal’s month of giveaways will include some raffle-style blog giveaways as well! This week, Monday through Friday, I’ll be posting a book a day to give away! 4 are knitting books, one is another kind of craft book, all ones I’ve been given and haven’t used, so I want them to go to new homes where they’ll be appreciated and used!

And one last thing, for you, my dear blog readers… I’m extending the shop giveaway to pattern sales (on leethal or ravelry) for anyone who reads this and contacts me about it – if you purchase $12 or more worth of pattern pdfs, through April 17th, email me (leemeredith at gmail dot com) with your gift choice and your mailing address, and I’ll send it your way!

I just found out from Heather this morning that she declared AprilStashbusting Month! So, I didn’t know it when I planned my giveaway month, but I’m totally participating in busting my stash (though I doubt I’ll be doing much stash crafting this month!) – play along and make things with your stash stuff! Yeah!

I almost forgot – I added a bunch of new leethal recycled, printed shirts (and a couple sweatshirts) to the shop! They were made back in December, finally online now… I’m working on more shop updates, so throughout the next couple of weeks I’ll be adding more stuff for sale, and probably adding more to the giveaways page too (I’ll let you know about both here on the blog), but then after the move, I’ll probably be taking certain things that haven’t sold out of the shop for good.

January 12, 2010

Hey remember when I was really into making earrings for awhile? Yeah that was fun, what happened?! I don’t know, but a few friends and I had a jewelry party the other night and I made 6 pairs! (I forgot to include the 6th in the line-up because I was wearing them.)

I want to take better photos of them all, but I know if I wait till that’s done I’ll end up never blogging about them… so someday if I end up shooting them, the photos will go into my beading flickr set. Anyway, I love how full my earrings frame holder thing is looking these days!

Such an improvement from when I first made it:

(Side note: that awesome Lee button was given to me by the fabulous Susan Beal, author of Bead Simple, which was the book that got me into beading in the first place!)

If this inspires you at all, be sure to check out my Craftstylish tutorial on easy 2-bead earrings. I’m excited to start making (and wearing!) them again – I’ve collected a huge stash of beads (thanks to Knittn’ Kitten mostly) so I see lots of beading in 2010!

September 5, 2008

a couple things… i am now making my recycled paperclip beaded stitch markers in 2 sizes: for size US17 and smaller needles, and size US10 and smaller. and, i have these photos with labels on each marker, so you can order a specific stitch marker!

so if you want a specific marker, just order from my yarn page, then send me a quick email (leethalkoala at yahoo dot com) letting me know the number on the picture. and i am definitely taking custom orders for no additional charge – just tell me what color(s) and/or specific beads you’d like, needle size, etc, and allow a couple extra days for me to make it/them. also, if anyone wants a bunch of markers (like, 4 or more), i’m willing to drop the price to $3 each. just let me know and i’ll send a priced invoice.

ok enough leethal shop stuff. moving on… in case you haven’t seen on my twitter/flickr/facebook already, pete and i are engaged! it doesn’t seem like a huge deal, since we’ve been together over 3.5 years now, and we’re not planning on actually getting married for quite awhile, and i’ve basically planned to spend my whole life with him since our 1 month anniversary, pretty much… but it still feels like kind of a big deal…

the proposal itself was a bit silly, fitting for us, and he used a temporary super blingy fake diamond ring so i could pick out my own ring. since i might be wearing it for a couple years before switching to the wedding ring, i wanted to pick a good one. which meant: comfy (i’m not used to rings since i haven’t worn any regularly since high school), unique, not too big and not too small, not too much color since i am always covered in colors… i spent hours looking at rings on etsy, considering many, like this and this and this and this and this and all of these(!)… but the main problem with anything online was i wanted to try it on, make sure it fit well and was comfy for me. so i ended up finding this perfect ring at a jewelry shop off hawthorne (by buffalo exchange), which i assume is by a local portland artist (although i forgot to ask!) and fits great and is the perfect size and i looove it!!

oh and by the way, the whole ring thing in general is pretty silly… pete joked about getting me a ring that said “support the patriarchy.” i always thought i didn’t care about all the standard social procedures, figured we’d just kinda say, hey let’s get married sometime, ok, and not bother with an engagement ring at all. but, once he actually did propose in a semi-official way, i realized all this stuff is kinda fun and i did want a ring. so, eh, i won’t over-analyze it, i’m not doing it to show that he owns me, i’m doing it because i love him and jewelry is fun, so there patriarchy. hehe…

and definitely don’t expect wedding photos anytime soon. i want to wait to start the married part of my life until my whole career situation is a little less scary, until things are further off the ground, and until we can see buying a house in the visible future, hopefully…. hey if you want to help, check out my shop! ok that was shameless, i admit it…

June 13, 2008

look what i made! when i started making all those earrings, i didn’t have anywhere to put them, so i came up with this! i just happened to have a perfect size/shape glassless frame from scrap, and i had the other leg of pink fishnet that i used to dress up our boring ikea lampshade, perfect!

i don’t have tutorial photos, but it should be easy to explain. find a long frame, or you could build one – mine is about 11×20″ edge to edge (so the photo size that would fit would be 9x18ish). cut the leg off a pair of fishnets, and cut the toe off so it’s an open tube. with nothing in the frame (and make sure there’s no sharp bits sticking out that would hold the glass in and would rip the fishnets), pull the fishnet tube onto the frame, so it wraps all the way around, stretching from top to bottom. i tied a ribbon around the bottom for stud type earrings. for necklaces+bracelets to hang at the top, i nailed 4 long nails through the fishnet and into the wall behind. i’m sure there would be better ways to do this, but i was lazy and didn’t want to figure it out.

i took the frame photos before making some more earrings, so my frame is filling up nicely!

that last pair was actually for my mom, but i love them so i’ll probably copy the design for myself. yay earrings!

April 23, 2008

so i went to that bead simple event a little while back, got the book the same day, and am now a little mad at susan for totally getting me into this whole new beading world! ok, not really mad no, but i am spending all kinds of time and money on it – fun stuff!! so far i’ve been making lots of earrings for myself, but i’m thinking about making beaded stitch markers to sell, i’ll see how it goes…

here are all the earrings i’ve made so far, yay! (almost all the beads are vintage from knittn’ kitten!)

so now i’ll be wearing earrings every day! a big change for me, since i haven’t worn any at all regularly since high school. but it works out well – all winter i wore a hat of some kind every single day, and now that it’ll be getting warmer soon (i hope!!) i’ve been thinking about how un-accessorized my head will feel, so earrings will by my new hat! yeah!